Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Petr Kouřil, Michal Šimeček: Mapping the history of prefabricated wooden architecture in post-socialist countries: from archival research to automatic detection using open map sources and back again

Prefabricated timber houses produced during and after the WWII by the company Puutalo Oy in Finland represent an example of a highly specific and local(ized) residential architecture, while at the same time being a global(ized) phenomenon, as thousands of these houses were exportedto different world countries during the post-war period (Vesikansa et al. 2021; http://www.mfa.fi/poutalo; Ferenčuhová 2021). Moreover, prefabricated family houses from Finland further inspired the design of wooden prefabricated houses that were later produced elsewhere (e.g., in socialist Czechoslovakia [Liška 2021]). Unlike other post-war prefabricated residential architecture, typically made of concrete panels and leading to massive construction of high-rise housing estates across Central and Eastern Europe, ‘Finnish’ wooden prefabricated houses did not become an icon of (post)socialist urban landscape. They were built in smaller numbers and appeared in smaller settlements, responding to the needs of the post-war industrial development. Most of them were single-family houses any many of them underwent considerable renovation since their construction that transformed their unified appearance, thus making their presence less obvious.

Our presentation will explain how we proceeded whenattempting to systematically map the post-war prefabricated wooden ‘Finnish houses’ that are still standing today in the Czech Republic. We will describe the steps that we undertook in the past years, individually or jointly, from archival research and visits to the localities, analyzing available registers and historical maps, to programming an automatic detection tool using open map sources to find these structures. We will focus on out ining the last method and the results it brought in greater detail. We shall then discuss these results and the limitations of individual methods, as well as their various contribution to understanding this architecture’s specifichistory in the Czech Republic.

The website of the conference is here.